Thursday, October 30, 2008

Teaching Your Child Solfege

Music Lesson: Solfege

(Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music)

What is solfege?Solfege is an important part of learning to read music and is a technique used to teach sight-singing or sight reading. Each note in solfege is sung to a different syllable do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, and each note has a corresponding hand sign (as seen in photo below).

To teach your child solfege do the following:

1. Sing do(doh) to the first pitch of any major scale (i.e. if you choose the major C scale, C would be your first note).

2. Now, sing and sign do with your hand (as seen in photo below).

3. Have your child sing and sign do. If needed, help mold your child's hand into the do shape until he or she can sign do his or herself.

What a wonderful site to stumble onto from your comment over at Discursively Happy.

My girl takes guitar once a week from Childbloom (loves it,) and just started piano once a week - the latter, the teacher comes right to our house - love it!! Kelly had some lessons on piano last year and I was so purprised to see pretty-much all the notes came back to her.